With the Daytona 500 this weekend and NASCAR fever heating up, it's time to check in on our resident racecar driver, Larry Galberd! EP Minerals' Floor-Dry, the #1 absorbent for the racetrack, is one of Larry's sponsors.

If you'll recall from a previous blog post, EP Minerals’ Global Technical Services Director Larry Galberd leads a double life. By day, Larry could be anywhere in the world helping EP Minerals’ diatomaceous earth or perlite filtration customers optimize their filtration processes and solve problems. By night and on weekends (and any other chance he gets) Larry is driving hell bent for leather at 140 mph for his Blew-By-You race car team in the ChumpCar Racing Series. Larry and his team are “sponsored” (I use that term loosely) by EP Minerals’ Floor-Dry absorbent, the #1 automobile oil spill cleanup product that can be found at all the major auto supply stores today.

This past weekend we raced our new car - #112. This was a 14 hour race. The Chumpcar Series is an affordable series with real racing and real cheap “Joe Average” type cars. Our new #112 is a better, faster car than I've had in the past.

The premise of endurance racing is to finish the race, and placement is based on how many laps are driven in the race. The faster cars with no problems will complete the most laps and prizes are awarded for the first three places. Driver stints last 2 hours after which the car must pit for a driver change, fueling and any repair work to the car. Best case scenario you are in the pits for the mandatory 5-minute pit stop and then the car re-enters the race. During the pit stop any spillage of fuel or other fluids leaked must be cleaned from the pit area. We use EP Minerals’ Floor-Dry granular diatomaceous earth (DE) absorbent to soak up these spills, and it does a great job.

Larry Galberd always has his bag of super absorbent Floor-Dry ready to soak up oil spills at the racetrack

By the way, our racing team is called Blew-By-You. We drive fast as hell, back straights over 135-140 and through the turns (these at road tracks with lots of turns) some at 80-100 mph so slower depending on difficulty. It’s all about lap times.

We had 5 drivers for this race, and we started with 89 other cars. We finished 13th. The car we bought has finished races in 1st, 3rd, and 5th places before, so it has a very good pedigree. We are hoping to podium in our future races, and we’ll use EP Minerals’ Floor-Dry with the new racecar as well.

I also own a Porsche race car with one other friend and we run this car in HPDE (High-Performance Driver Education) events. These events are not full on racing, but we run on the premier Road Tracks around the Southeast ( Road Atlanta, Barber Motor Sports Park (Birmingham, AL), Virginia International Raceway, etc.). We are typically on the track with 25-30 other cars with unlimited passing allowed, and these are typically much higher speed events that the Chumpcar races (higher horsepower cars).

All of our cars are badged with EP Minerals’ Floor-Dry stickers, and Floor-Dry absorbent is used in the pits. Other teams are seeing us using Floor-Dry and asking where they can get it!